Nest Thermostat

Updated: 1 month ago

In Short

The Nest Thermostat is to home heating and cooling what the smartphone is to the rotary telephone. In 2010, a couple of former Apple engineers — Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers — formed Nest Labs. The goal? Make a home thermostat that didn't suck, could save you money, and be something that you would actually want to stick to your wall. In 2011, the Nest Learning Thermostat, the first of the company's products, was born.

Nest is a simple but brilliant thermostat

At its core, the Nest Thermostat is, as the name implies, a home thermostat. It toggles the heating and cooling in your home. If you're cold, you turn the heat up. If you're hot, you turn the air up. But Nests's real power comes from its connectivity. Nest ties into your home Wifi to connect to the Internet, as well as your mobile devices — and even other Nest devices in your home.

Like so many good products — and especially first-generation tech products — Nest isn't cheap. At launch, Nest was rightly compared to the iPhone. Nest was simple. Nest was beautifully designed. Nest did things in a way so that you weren't starting from scratch, that you didn't have to relearn how to heat and cool your home. Really, the only hurdles for purchasing a Nest Product were the underlying heating and cooling equipment, not being afraid to do some minor electrical work, and the ability to shell out the $249 for a single thermostat. Like we said — the Nest Thermostat isn't cheap.

Owning a smartphone isn't a requirement for owning a Nest Thermostat, though it does make the experience more enjoyable, and certainly more flexible. Nest works with Android smartphones and tablets as well as with iOS devices — the iPhone and iPad. But you also can control it remotely via a web browser. The Nest Thermostat is smart enough to talk to other Nests in your home. If you've given it your ZIP Code in setup, your NEST Thermostat will know your rough location and know what the weather is like. Nest also pays attention — learns, really — your habits. Do you like it warm at night while you sleep? It'll help find the right temperature setting. Are you gone all day but forget to turn down the heat? Nest will learn that, too, and adjust to an "away" status. It'll recognize when you return home and wake things up again.

Or, our favorite, is when you use Nest to remotely turn on the heat or air on the way home, arriving and a perfectly comfortable house.

In addition to the Nest Thermostat, Nest Labs also has also released a $129 combination smoke/carbon monoxide detector, dubbed the Nest Protect.

Where to purchase a Nest Thermostat

26 January 2015 53By Russell HollyWelcome to the first mainstream connected home appliance everyone should want to own
Much in the same way that smartphones have come to enhance the way we communicate, the world of connected home tech is all about enhancing the way your living space communicates...

29 January 2015 13By Russell HollyAs a standalone device, Nest is cool. The 'Works with Nest' program makes it invaluable
In the first part of our Nest Thermostat series, I called this device the first connected home appliance everyone should want to own...

04 November 2016 99By Jerry HildenbrandThere is a fair-sized market filled with smart thermostats out there. You have the Nest, which most everyone reading Android Central on the regular will know about, but other companies — both newer names like Ecobee as well as familiar names like Honeywell — have products with their own set of compelling features. But when you get down to the basics, most of them are doing the same things.

14 July 2016 19By Rich EdmondsNest has launched an outdoor version of its popular Cam. If you've been looking to invest in a new security camera for your home to record the front or back yard, this may be your perfect solution.

11 May 2016 5By Dan Thorp-LancasterGoogle-owned Nest has now released an open source version of its Thread networking protocol, opening it up to be used by all smart home device manufacturers and developers.

13 April 2016 25By John CallahamNest CEO Tony Fadell reportedly made a rare appearence earlier this month at an all-hands meeting at Google. A story claims he defended the smart devices division at the meeting, while also stating that neither Nest nor himself was perfect.

31 March 2016 39By Rich EdmondsNest could be in trouble under the Alphabet umbrella, according to a Recode report. The publication notes that while Nest pocketed $340 million last year, it's below expectations Google had set for its acquisition.

22 March 2016 18By Harish JonnalagaddaDiscount online retailer Woot is offering the third-generation Nest Learning Thermostat for $199, a discount of $50 from the device's list price of $249. The offer's good for one day only, or until stocks last.